1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an opto-electric bus module and a method of manufacturing the same, and more particularly, to an opto-electric bus module which simultaneously provides optical communication and electric communication between semiconductor chips, and a method of manufacturing the opto-electric bus module.
This work was supported by IT R&D program of MIC/IITA[2006-S-073-01, Nano flexible opto-electric PCB module for portable display].
2. Description of the Related Art
The development of technologies for semiconductor devices embedded in portable information communication devices requires information transmission techniques for transmitting mass information to monitors, hard disks, memories, and the like at high speeds.
Moreover, recent potable terminals such as cellular phones require techniques for high-speed interconnection between semiconductor chips in order to process still image and moving image information as well as conventional voice information at high speeds.
With advances in technologies, there have emerged optical interconnection techniques capable of overcoming limitations, such as signal integrity, crosstalk, and electromagnetic interference (EMI) of conventional electric conducting wires, for high-speed interconnection between semiconductor chips and there have been developed optical communication structures and methods between semiconductor chips by using various optical connectors.
However, traditional parallel optical interconnection techniques using optical connectors require removable optical connectors techniques in which sophisticated and solid optical coupling between an opto-electric device (light emitting device or light receiving device) and an optical fiber can be freely established and can then be released if necessary.
The removable optical connectors are highly likely to undergo twist of optical alignment between an opto-electric device and an optical fiber due to repetitive removal, resulting in degradation of optical coupling efficiency.
Moreover, the degradation of optical coupling efficiency may cause a loss of continuously transmitted information or a problem in transmission.
Although solid optical connectors for sophisticated and solid optical alignment between an opto-electric device and an optical fiber have been developed, they increase the overall size of the optical connectors. Such a size increase may cause the inappropriate use of the space of the entire optical communication module and system using the optical connectors.
Recently, communication between semiconductor chips requires conventional low-speed electric communication as well as conventional high-speed optical communication, and electric communication between semiconductor chips using conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs) cannot guarantee sufficient miniaturization because the thickness and space of the PCBs have to be considered in order to respond to transmission length increase and semiconductor chip miniaturization.